Gower in Winter: Last Poems

Abstract

On those many occasions (surely!) when we close our eyes and call up John Gower, the image that I wager we conjure most often is of an elderly, bearded man in a long robe. Depending upon our degree of familiarity with the realia of Gower scholarship, that robe might be blue and the beard mediumlength, forked, and salt-and-pepper (as “he” appears, along with beehive hat and longbow, in London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius A.iv, fol. 9v); or, alternatively, the gown might be red and gold, and the beard shorter, a rounded Van Dyke, thick and lustrous black (as presently on his tomb effigy, in Southwark Cathedral);2 or the gown is wholly red and the beard white, long, and unshaven from ear to scraggly end near mid-chest (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 902, fol. 8r). Or perhaps, if one is a true aficionado, Gower appears (as he does in a tiny miniature in London, British Library MS Additional 42131, fol. 209v), naked from the collarbone up, bald on top but with shoulder-length, wavy white hair below, bushy white eyebrows and a white beard, grizzled and forked, that extends from earlobe to what would have been four or five inches below his chin if blown up to scale.